How Google Makes Our Lives Easier
November 2, 2010
Google offers many tools to aid in the tracking and promotion of your website. Google Analytics is one of these. This interface allows you to place a piece of code on each page of your website and by doing so tracks the amount of visitors you receive. You can track monthly visitors and compare traffic to the past. Not only is it chock full of information including total monthly visits, pageviews, average time on site, and traffic sources, but you can also set up what they call “goals” to track specific conversions. Another wonderful highlight to Google Ananlytics is the fact that you can create custom reports. This can be highly beneficial in the reporting for SEO campaigns because we can send customers specific traffic information to help them better understand and see the progress that is being made on their account.
Another one of our favorite Google tools is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This is an extraordinary tool that helps us select the best keywords for our customer’s SEO campaigns. You can select specific keywords to research and it will also provide you with variations of these keywords. Listed next to these keywords are Global Monthly Searches (the average monthly searches over a 12 month period for a keyword entered from anywhere in the world, Local Monthly Searches (the average monthly searches over a 12 month period for a keyword entered for the countries specified within the Adword campaign settings) and Competition (whether or not a keyword is considered to be competitive). Sometimes if a keyword is deemed too competitive, there is a variation that will work successfully instead.
Another tool that is starting to become extremely popular with Google is Google Places. Creating a Google Places profile is a great way to have your business recognized. Once you have registered with Google Places and completed the information, your business will obtain a listing that usually appears on the top of Google for some or all of the specific keywords that your website is targeting. This listing can include photos and/or videos, a map location and all of the pertinent information that your customers will need to find your business including phone number and address. These listings also include a little blurb about your company.
Google goes to extreme measures to ensure that they are always ahead of (even their own) game; in the process they create tools that make our jobs (and thus, our lives) easier. Thanks Google, you always seem to outdo yourself!